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| Images courtesy of Janus Films |
William Faulkner’s 1931 novel Sanctuary which told
the story of the rape and kidnapping of an upper-class Mississippi college girl
named Temple Drake during the Prohibition era at the hands of bootleggers was a
lightning rod for controversy when it was initially published. At once a commercial and critical success catapulting
the author into the mainstream, the text horrified readers and faced condemnation
from numerous avenues including being banned in Canada 1932 and Faulkner
himself being ousted from the Boy Scouts as a den leader. That it was made into a film at all just two
years after being unveiled to a still unprepared public eye (let alone two more
adaptations decades later) is the focus of today’s Criterion Corner: Stephen
Roberts’ harrowing and controversial pre-code film The Story of Temple Drake.
Temple Drake (Miriam Hopkins of Trouble in Paradise) is
an aggressive carefree granddaughter of a notable and admired small-town judge
in Mississippi. Unwilling to marry her clean-cut
lawyer boyfriend Stephen Benbow (William Gargan) whose proposals she declines
twice thus garnering the reputation of a town tart, she goes out to party with
one of her alcoholic suitors Toddy Gowan (William Collier Jr.) where they
eventually wind up crashing their car near a dilapidated farm now functioning
as a speakeasy. Meanwhile Trigger (Jack
La Rue) a gangster-bootlegger working the speakeasy forces the drunken Toddy
and now terrified Temple Drake into the household leading towards maybe the
silver screen’s very first depiction of sexual assault and/or slavery.
Written for the screen by Oliver H.P. Garrett of Duel in
the Sun, the film was considered lost until the 1950s when it re-emerged in
16mm prints. Kept from view following
the installment of the Hays Code which the film was primarily responsible for
engendering, The Story of Temple Drake though dated somewhat by what is
or isn’t allowed onscreen nevertheless is a powerfully ferocious pre-code drama
featuring an astonishing performance from Miriam Hopkins and a nefariously
scary heavy with Jack La Rue. While the more
extreme elements of the text were ironed out by censors with the infamous assault
with a foreign object being reshot with no allusion to it and the screen fades
out before we can see the implied act, it nevertheless roused the ire of what
would or wouldn’t become the Hays Code as well as angered newspapers who
initially objected to it being greenlit in the first place.
Initially thought to be tawdry and trashy, the film is a
masterclass work of confrontational filmmaking replete with tight closeups of
actors staring directly into the camera and first person point-of-view tracking
shots rendered by Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans cinematographer Karl Struss. From images of the upper-class town club
dance to the squalor of the speakeasy, the film was something of a marvel for the
levels of grime being conveyed on the silver screen though Miriam Hopkins
remains radiant in close-up. Featuring music
by four composers Karl Hajos, Bernhard Kaun, John Leipold and Ralph Rainger,
the movie starts off as something of a musical journey before boiling down to a
thunderous chamber piece of being bounced around riff raff that eventually
segues into the framework of a courtroom drama whose coda differs considerably
from the text.
In spite of the controversy and subsequent burial, The
Story of Temple Drake was a commercial success among the top box office
winners of 1933. Some think perhaps the
intent of Faulkner’s text got lost in translation but nevertheless the film was
savaged by critics and following the installment of the Hays Code it
disappeared completely. Nevertheless, that
didn’t stop director Tony Richardson from adapting a hybrid of both Sanctuary
and it’s sequel novel Requiem for a Nun into a 1961 CinemaScope film
featuring Lee Remick and Yves Montand to mixed reviews though nowhere near the
same level of public outcry. Then in
2007, Sanctuary saw the most complete and extreme adaptation to date
with Aleksei Balabanov’s Russian transposition Cargo 200 which caused
almost as much (if not more) controversy in that country than the 1933 film.
Outside of the furor Cargo 200 was whipping up, the
Museum of Modern Art restored The Story of Temple Drake in 2011 and
began screening it to the public again circa 2011. Years later in 2019, The Criterion Collection
finally released the film on DVD and Blu-Ray disc and seen now is something of
a proto-MeToo film about finding the courage and strength to come forward and confess
a painful memory of sexual assault against a fiercely judgmental court of
public opinion. While bleak and
foreboding, in this version of Sanctuary there is a glimmer of hope
found in Miriam Hopkins’ impassioned performance of a well-to-do woman thrust
into unforeseen terrible circumstances and her fight for survival. Not a nice film but an important, necessary
pre-code epic whose cries and whispers are just as vitally relevant now as they
were then.
--Andrew Kotwicki
